Your birthday might say one thing, but your biological age—how old your cells and systems act—can tell a very different story. When the body is stressed, it shifts energy away from essential day-to-day functions like repair, renewal, and defense. Over time, this wear and tear accelerates the breakdown we call aging. While aging is a privilege, lowering your biological age is something you can actively influence.
Research shows that aging is closely linked to the loss of balance in the body’s systems, where inflammatory activity overwhelms repair processes. This doesn’t happen overnight—it’s the cumulative effect of years of internal imbalance, often beginning in the gut. And because each person has biochemical individuality, generic healthy aging methods don’t work for everyone—what supports one person’s cellular repair may actually increase stress or inflammation in someone else. That’s why it’s essential to look at your body’s real-time signals and personalize your approach.
The good news? Biological aging is not set in stone. Your daily choices—from nutrition and sleep to stress management and microbiome health—play a powerful role in how your body ages. By optimizing your gut and cellular function, you can slow biological aging and support longevity from the inside out.
1. Build a Resilient Gut Microbiome
Your gut is home to trillions of microbes that influence everything from digestion to immune function to how fast your cells age. A diverse microbiome is one of your greatest defenses against accelerated aging.
How to do it:
Eat a wide variety of fiber-rich plants—aim for 30+ different plant foods per week.
Rotate colorful fruits and vegetables to feed different beneficial bacteria.
Include fermented foods like kimchi, sauerkraut, or kefir for live probiotics, if these foods are recommended for you.
Make sure to follow your Viome recommendations for which foods work best with your unique biology. Some people aren’t able to process oxalates in healthy foods like spinach. Sauerkraut is high in FODMAPs, which cause digestive issues for some. Understanding your unique biology is key.
Why it matters:
Richness and diversity of gut microbes are directly related to physical aging, frailty, and biological age. Increased biological age is associated with pronounced alterations in gut diversity. A study enrolled a cohort of long-living individuals aged 90 and above and characterized and compared their gut microbiota with that of a younger adult group. Surprisingly, the study found that the long-living group had a greater gut microbiome diversity than the younger adult group.1
2. Reduce Inflammatory Activity with Restorative Habits
Low-grade, chronic inflammatory activity is a well-known driver of faster biological aging. It’s often triggered by processed foods, high stress, and poor sleep.
Inflammation acts like tiny fires smoldering inside your body. When those fires never go out, they chip away at healthy cells and speed up aging. Your body naturally tries to repair that damage, but constant stress makes the job harder. This is where your mitochondria—the little “batteries” inside each cell—come in. When inflammation is low, they generate energy more efficiently, fueling your body and powering repair. Less internal stress means healthier, more energized cells that can restore themselves the way they’re designed to.
How to do it:
Prioritize 7–9 hours of quality sleep every night.
Integrate mindfulness practices like meditation, deep breathing, or journaling.
Move your body daily with activities that are enjoyable and sustainable.
Focus on eating whole foods with minimally processed ingredients. Aim for organic and non-GMO products.
Learn more about your microbiome’s unique biochemical pathways so you can understand which activities are helping or harming your inflammatory response.
Examples of pathways analyzed in the Full Body Intelligence™ Test:
Butyrate Production Pathway – Butyrate is an anti-inflammatory short-chain fatty acid produced by certain gut microbes. Low butyrate activity is tied to chronic inflammation and aging.
Cellular Stress Pathways – Viome can detect when oxidative stress is elevated, signaling increased biological wear and tear.
Immune System Modulation Pathways – Show how microbial activity directly influences whether the immune system is calm and balanced or in a state of hyperactivation.
Why it matters:
Reducing inflammation supports cell repair and mitochondrial health—your cells’ energy powerhouses. Viome’s pathway scores, such as Butyrate Production or Cellular Stress, can reveal if your microbiome is helping to calm or increase inflammatory activity in your body.
3. Limit Harmful Exposures
Environmental toxins and certain chemicals can directly damage cells and disrupt your microbiome.
How to do it:
Avoid ultra-processed foods and additives that harm gut bacteria.
Choose low-toxin household and personal care products.
Filter your water to reduce contaminants like heavy metals or chlorine.
Fortify your gut lining to prevent toxins from crossing into the bloodstream.
Why it matters:
Reducing your toxic load gives your cells and microbiome more bandwidth to focus on repair, balance, and longevity—not constant damage control.
4. Personalize Your Nutrition with Data
Generic diets don’t account for your unique microbiome activity. Foods considered “healthy” for most may create unwanted and harmful biochemical reactions for you.
How to do it:
Identify your foods: Use a science-based tool like Viome’s Full Body Intelligence™ Test to discover which foods actively support your gut health—and which ones may be creating stress or inflammation.
Choose the right supplements: One-size-fits-all supplements can overload your system with unnecessary ingredients or the wrong dosages that can cause harm (and be expensive as well). Viome delivers precision supplements and targeted biotic blends, custom-formulated in the exact amounts we’ve identified your body needs.
Address root causes: Pinpoint and target specific biological challenges such as high microbial toxin production, sluggish detox pathways, or impaired cell renewal—with personalized food and supplement recommendations designed to maintain balance.*
Why it matters:
Personalized nutrition recommendations help reduce cellular stress, create a stronger and more efficient gut, increase nutrient absorption, support healthy aging pathways, and slow the wear and tear that accelerates your biological clock.*
Viome Insight:
Viome’s biological aging study analyzed stool and blood samples from over 90,000 people, revealing crucial insights into biological aging and how our microbiome and nutrition control it. One of the striking results in this paper is that people on paleo diets are, as a group, chronologically younger but biologically older (higher model-predicted ages). On the other hand, people on vegetarian diets are, as a group, chronologically older but biologically younger (lower model-predicted ages). Several microbiome and human gene expression pathways play a significant role in the determination of biological aging. This insight not only advances our understanding of the aging process but also provides practical considerations to influence it through precision nutrition.*
References:
1. Vincent J Maffei , Sangkyu Kim , Eugene Blanchard, IV , Meng Luo , S Michal Jazwinski , Christopher M Taylor , David A Welsh Author (2017). The Journals of Gerontology: Series A, Volume 72, Issue 11, November 2017, Pages 1474–1482, doi.org/10.1093/gerona/glx042
